What has it been? A week since hubris made me gloat about being old and with it. Well, Nemesis is here and she’s beaten me on the souls of my feet.
I was helping my daughter build a clubhouse for the grandkids most of the day. Bugged out at the end of the day, figuring I may even run when I get home.
Ahhh….No. A few moments sitting and I’m done. Feets up time. Why not write?
Because I got nothing to say.
But right on queue, I happened upon Whores and Ale where there was a piece on that warmed my heart:
I’ve been the go to guy for nearly all my career. Even now, after assimilating another company, the noobs get sent to me for Framemaker advice, as if I didn’t just figure it out myself five minutes ago.
Oh the stories I could tell. I could start a memory lane that could last years.
Here’s one of the funnier ones.
I was a field tech for a decade or so. It was my job to mostly fix what others had screwed up. I left that gig and became a consultant on a large IT transformation project. Under me was all the voice and data networking and gear. No PCs, no servers, no end user nothing. I’d get user tickets all the time.
“Can you go up and look at this guy’s palm pilot?”
Uh…that’s not my job.
“Well you have one”. Whatever. Dude had 82,000 emails in his inbox. That’s why it don’t sync.
“This guy on the second floor can’t get email”
So? Not my job. You know that.
“Could you go look at it? He yelled at us” Ugh… Dude had Outlook on ‘work offline’. “I’M NOT STUPID, I HAVE A PHD YOU KNOW!”. Ok Dr. Stoopid. Your email’s working now.
One of the repeat offenders was a guy named ‘Duff’. I liked to call him Puffy, because he looked like a rapper. Think Notorious B.I.G. I was sitting at my cube, minding my business, and Duff appears in the doorway:
What’s up Duff?
“Well, they can’t connect on the second floor”
Is it one person or everyone? Turns out it was one.
OK. Does the PC have a green light on the NIC?
“Yeah. Well, they can’t connect”
Is it even plugged in? Did you look at the connection in the closet?
“Well yeah….But you see, they can’t connect”
Did you want me to look at it?
“Would’ya?” – It wasn’t plugged in. FFS. Can you lift a finger?
We had an office move out in San Mateo, so they sent us two out there. Me to setup the network and phones, Duff to do the server and desktops. I’m not a server guy (at the time) but I had to work with all sorts – NT, Solaris, HP-UX. All the telecom gear ran on servers of some sort.
So I’m done fairly quickly, and was entertaining myself surfing the web (it was new at the time – 1998 or so). Duff was trying to get NT4 loaded on an HP server with a RAID array. Should’ve been easy enough. But I see he’s struggling. Gets a confused look, pauses, rubs his face like Curly, and stabs the reset button. This repeated 4-5 times.
Hey Duff!
“What?”
Your needle’s stuck. Try something different.
“Huh?”
You keep hitting reset over and over. Doesn’t appear to work. Try something else.
I forget what his issue was. I remember it being simple.
I miss that kind of work. I liked the challenge and the feeling of satisfaction when I’d fix something.
Inspected By Pat 